Company leader
Greg Albers
Chairman, Co-founder, and Scientific Lead
RapidAI
Greg Albers is chairman, co-founder, and scientific lead of RapidAI and a Stanford University stroke neurologist. RapidAI's software analyzes brain scans so its hospital customers' stroke teams can see which patients still have brain tissue worth saving.
Studying Memory as an Undergraduate
His interest in the brain began in high school, with how memories are made. At UC Irvine he studied neuroscience with Richard F. Thompson, a memory and learning researcher, but feeling isolated in the lab, he turned to neurology to study the brain in patients.
Training in Neurology
He received his MD from the University of California San Diego in 1984 and completed his residency and stroke fellowship at Stanford University. As a resident he met Dennis Choi, who was studying why brain cells die so quickly when oxygen and glucose are cut off. "Dennis is a phenomenal scientist, who was trying to treat stroke in a petri dish," Albers said, and he set out to carry that work to patients.
Watching Strokes Grow on MRI
In 1992 he co-founded the Stanford Stroke Center, which he has directed since. No stroke treatment was approved then, and he had been taught that any treatment had to come ultra early. His team began doing diffusion MRI on every stroke patient at Stanford and found that in most of them the stroke grew slowly, often over 24 hours and sometimes for three days. That led to software that measures how much tissue is dead and how much can still be saved, so a team could "throw away the stopwatch".
He is the Coyote Foundation Professor of Neurology at Stanford, has written more than 450 peer-reviewed articles, and chairs the Stroke Treatment Academic Industry Roundtable. In 2011 the American Heart Association gave him its David G. Sherman Award for outstanding contributions to stroke research.
Extending the Treatment Window
He was principal investigator of all three DEFUSE studies, which used advanced brain imaging to show how stroke damage develops over time. DEFUSE 3 and the DAWN trial used Rapid imaging to select patients for late treatment, and in 2018, on the day he presented DEFUSE 3 at the International Stroke Conference, the American Stroke Association released guidelines that extended the treatment window from 6 to 24 hours. He was instrumental in developing the Rapid platform, which he co-founded with Roland Bammer.
"This is why you become a physician, to try to be able to do this type of research and have this type of impact," he said.